Hi, this is my first post and my first attempt at a fanfic. I like wuxia, I like chanbara, I like history, and I'd like to improve my writing skills; what better ways, then, than to write a fanfic, right? ^-^
Hope you find it a fun read.
Chapter 1
A Day of No Particular Significance
It wasn't a particularly hot day, even though it was already mid-summer. Rather, it was the flies, incessantly buzzing around everyone and everything that irritated, if the corpse didn’t already—and for some, it didn’t. The corpse. Inspector Yuying found himself irritated; a fourth corpse in half as many days, Hongzheng was going to be pissed. Damn that Manchu pig! Unconsciously, his hand reached into his sleeves, fingering that small pouch full of tobacco within the voluminous folds of his coat—and just as fast, it came out. Some of the men here were Hongzheng’s and if he were seen chewing some barbarian filth, he’d get an earful, and what he did not need was an earful from an incompetent xenophobe who showed his love for the Barbarians by raping and torturing an unfortunate Barbarian nun; or was that torturing and then raping? Either way, he was a bad news.
He looked at the corpse. It was neatly eviscerated, as if by a butcher, cut up so that all the major muscles and arteries sliced and exposed to open air like a pig hung for roast—only it wasn’t done by a butcher. No, the man (and it was only one man) who did this was an exceedingly skilled swordsman, likes of which he’s never seen before. Mere thought at the man’s skill sent shivers down his spine, but he collected himself and looked around. In this dingy alley, the smells of feces—human and animal—intertwined with the corpse’s stink to create a veritable feast for the crows and flies, which made the men all the more surly. There was Liu, a dunce but a giant of a man; Zhu, a twitchy little rat whose knowledge of Barbarian medicine he found very useful; Jing, a master of knives who hopes to take Yuying’s place; and Zheng, a useless layabout who only found a place here because of that Manch pig. These were his men, deputized by the magistrate Lin Hongzheng to keep peace in the city of Xiamen in Fujian Province.
“Another day, another stiff, boss,” whined Zheng, “ I need a drink.” Yuying looked at his ugly mug and he so dearly wanted to punch him, but just droned, “after work… after work”.
“But what’s there for work? It’s the same MO as before. I don’t see anything to go by, like before. It’s a dead end, boss”
“Maybe.”
“But—“
He never had the chance to finish, because Liu had wrapped his steely, gigantic hands around Zheng’s scrawny throat. “Boss sez there’s work to be done, there’s work to be done, got it?” Yuying smiled; while his “smarts” could get on the nerves at times, Liu had so many qualities so fitting for this line of work—or the triads, for that matter. He told his men that he wanted to wrap this one too, “Hell, you ain’t the only ones with empty belly, you know. Mmm… a bowl of hot noodles would be damn perfect.” With that, he rolled up the dead man’s intestines with his scabbard. A wrenching noise and rounds of laughter could be heard, from Zheng and the rest of men, respectably